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Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Our “feature” last night was The Young Victoria, a sumptuously produced 2009 historical spectacle
from a British outfit called GK Films, released through Sony Pictures, which
I’d stumbled upon in the DVD backlog and wanted to see mainly to compare it
with the first three episodes of the more recent British ITV miniseries Victoria, which depicted pretty much the same set of
historical events. Both are about the early days of Princess Victoria
(incidentally she’s called Victoria in this one even before she assumes the
British throne, where the ITV show explained that her original name was
Alexandrina and she picked the name Victoria to rule under when she became
Queen) and her struggle to establish her royal authority even though she was
only 18 when her uncle, William IV, died and she succeeded to the throne. Her adversaries
include her own mother (Miranda Richardson) and the head of her mom’s
household, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). Her allies include the prime
minister, Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) of the Whig Party, and her royal
courtier (and cousin) and later husband, Prince Albert (played by Rupert Friend
as an icon of devastating sexiness and charm). The Young Victoria has its faults — it’s directed in a rather
slow-paced fashion by Jean-Marc Vallée (Charles saw enough French-sounding
names in the cast and crew lists, especially the latter, that he wondered if
this was a British-French co-production), it’s thoroughly drenched in the
past-is-brown look (though in the 19th century even the most
sumptuous upper-class homes were still lit by candlelight and therefore it’s
entirely possible everything in those big interiors did look a dingy brown at all times) and the action is
depicted effectively but lacks the crackling immediacy of the more recent ITV
production.

But Emily Blunt is excellent as the young Victoria (though Jenna
Coleman in the ITV series is just as good) and the film is compelling,
depicting Victoria as ferociously strong-willed in resisting the attempts of
her mom and Conroy to impose a regent on her (a regent is someone who rules in
a monarch’s place when he or she is too young for the throne — when her
predecessor died Victoria had just turned 18 but even before there had been
fierce pressure on her to sign away her right to rule unaided until she turned
25) and looking for a way to navigate the palace politics and assert her
authority. The key line occurs while Victoria and Albert are playing chess with
each other and she complains about all the political games that are being
played around her, and he says, “That’s why you need to learn to play them, and
play them better.” There are interesting differences between the way Julian
Fellowes’ script for The Young Victoria portrays the history and the way it was done in the ITV Victoria series — in this version Victoria does not have an unrequited crush on Lord Melbourne (indeed,
Fellowes takes it the other way and suggests that Melbourne is deliberately
flattering her and acting like a
would-be lover to get the Queen to do what he wants) — but it contains some of
the same incidents, including the really peculiar gimmick of Tory
prime-minister designate Robert Peel (Michael Maloney) insisting that Victoria
fire at least two of her ladies-in-waiting and replace them with wives of Tory
politicians, and Victoria’s angry refusal to do so on the (entirely reasonable,
it seems to me) ground that she shouldn’t have to change the members of her
personal household just because the Whigs lost a vote of confidence in
Parliament and according to Britain’s Constitutional traditions that meant she
was supposed to ask the Tory leader Peel to form the next government. At the
same time, the politeness with which the political feuds of Victoria’s time and
place were carried out, at least for public consumption, is odd to watch in the
middle of the first days of the Trumpocracy and the U.S.’s rule by a
megalomaniac dictator whose attitude to anyone who challenges him, from government bureaucrats to
newspapers (Trump openly called on someone to buy the New York Times and either “run it right” or close it down!), is get
with the program or get out.

One historical error in this film a number of
imdb.com “Goofs” contributors pointed out is that it depicts an 1840
assassination attempt on Victoria and Prince Albert heroically putting his own
body between hers and the assassin’s, thereby taking the bullet meant for her
and ending up with a wounded arm. Apparently, though there were a number of
real-life assassination attempts on Victoria and/or Albert, many of them linked
to the Chartist movement of activists challenging the malapportionment of
districts in the House of Commons and calling for secret ballots, pay for
Members of Parliament (so that the non-rich could afford to run) and other
reforms to make Britain more democratic (the Chartists were shown and
identified by name in the ITV miniseries but not here), none of the assassins
got close enough to inflict any actual injuries on the Queen or her husband.
Fellowes’ script also depicts Victoria and Albert as sexually attracted to each
other and very hot in bed —
though the joke “close your eyes and think of England” regarding a woman’s
obligation to submit to the dreary routine of sex dates from the Victorian era,
this Queen (or at least Fellowes’ version thereof) genuinely enjoys sex with
her husband and we get the impression they had nine kids together because they
thoroughly appreciated each other’s bedtime company and weren’t procreating
just out of a sense of royal obligation. The closing credits claim that
Victoria “remains the longest-reigning British sovereign to date,” which was
true in 2009 when the film was released, but in 2015 the current Queen
Elizabeth II (who apparently is having a royal snit right now because Prime
Minister Theresa May invited Donald Trump for a state visit to Britain and the
Queen really doesn’t want to have to receive that boor) broke her record.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

I watched the
PBS telecast of “Against the Odds,” an episode of the Australian ITV production
The Doctor Blake Mysteries that was actually quite good — a jockey dies of an apparent accident
the day after he won a big race that, we find out later, he was supposed to
throw — even though the show had a recurring flaw of British Commonwealth mysteries:
the characterizations are so deep and well-rounded that by the time writer
Stuart Page gets around to telling us who the murderer was (Blake deduces early
on that the rider — and his horse — were killed by someone stringing a rope
across the track so they would fall, though originally the killer intended the
jockey to die but the horse to live) we really don’t care that much. The
establishing story of Dr. Lucien Blake was he had served in the British
military as a medic in Singapore, and had been so traumatized by that
experience that after his discharge he returned to the small town of Ballarat,
Australia where he’d grown up. This episode explained why he hadn’t married his
partner Jean Beazley even though they were living together in small-town Australia
in the 1950’s and as far as anyone knew they were husband and wife.

It turns
out he already had a wife, Mei Lin Blake (Ling Cooper Tang), a part-Chinese,
part-British woman he’d met in China before the war and who’d been living with
him in Singapore when the war broke out, the British fortress in Singapore
fell, she was captured and held against her will for several years in
Japanese-occupied China during World War II until she managed to escape and
find her way back to Ballarat. She comes to live with her husband and her
husband’s current girlfriend until she realizes she’ll be a fish out of water —
and he sensibly lets her go, allowing her to move into a local hotel. By the
time this plot line resolves itself we hardly care anymore who killed the jockey
— or later set up the jockey’s principal rival to get killed when he was
trampled by a horse while fleeing — and there’s a nice performance by Damien
Richardson as local bookie Terrence Noonan, who when he isn’t fixing local
races is getting worried because the Australian government is about to
institute legal off-track betting and that will, of course, kill his business.
Noonan also has his hooks into the local police sergeant, Bill Hobart (David
Whiteley), who owes him 350 pounds and tells Noonan he intends to pay off his
debt even if he also has to arrest Noonan for murder — only it turns out the
real killer is the horse’s trainer, Agnes Clasby (Helen Morse), who had bet
against her own horse as part of Noonan’s scheme (as had the jockey riding him,
though eventually, like John Garfield at the end of Body and Soul, he recovered enough of his self-respect
that he won a contest even though he would have been better off financially if he’d lost) — and there’s also
the fascinating character of her stable hand Rose Anderson (Anna McGahan), who
makes no particular secret that she likes horses considerably better than
people and actually fires a gun in the general direction of Dr. Blake and the
principals at the end, which briefly makes her a red herring before Agnes is
revealed to be the killer.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

I watched the American
Experience special on biologist and
nature writer Rachel Carson, who trained as a marine biologist, worked for years
at the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife and stumbled into national
consciousness in 1951 with the publication of her book The Sea Around Us. Carson was born May 27, 1907 in Springdale,
Pennsylvania, the third of three daughters of the formidable Marie Carson, who
taught her to appreciate nature and study it scientifically. Carson eventually
fastened on marine biology as her specialty — though according to the show she
only dived once, and that was for just eight minutes — and her rise in the scientific
profession (she got a masters’ degree but for financial reasons had to drop her
pursuit of a Ph.D.) was hampered not only by being a woman but by having to
care for much of her family, including her mom (who depended on Rachel for
financial support after Rachel’s dad died in 1935), her sisters and their kids. So Rachel Carson had the responsibility of
caring for a family without having acquired one through a normal relationship —
indeed it seems likely that Carson never had a sexual relationship of any kind. Carson’s skill at popularizing
biological concepts and explaining them in prose of often breathtaking beauty
became apparent when she worked on Fish and Wildlife brochures and — a part of
her career unmentioned in the PBS documentary — the scripts for a weekly radio
show called Romance Under the Waters. She wrote her first book, Under the Sea-Winds, in 1941, but had the misfortune to release it just
before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II.
Meanwhile — and the PBS Carson documentary does an excellent job dramatizing
this with quite a lot of footage from industry and government promotional films
of the period — the insect-killing properties of a chemical called DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which was used
extensively in both the European and Pacific theatres. There are shots of
people in Naples enthusiastically lining up to be sprayed with DDT to avoid
getting lice, and also notes on how the stuff was used in the Pacific to stop
the spread of the Anopheles
mosquito that spreads malaria. After the war DDT was released for civilian use
and heavily promoted as a chemical that would be lethal to insects but harmless
to people, and at the same time the development of atomic weapons and
particularly the hydrogen bomb made people aware for the first time that
chemicals in the atmosphere that were barely visible could nonetheless kill.
(The Carson documentary tells the story of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky
Dragon V, whose crew was doused with
fallout from America’s first H-bomb test, leading to the death of everyone on
board from radiation sickness — though the show did not mention that it was this incident that inspired
the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla.) Carson had become concerned with DDT’s potential
long-term implications — particularly its effect on birds and its gradual
accumulation in higher and higher concentrations as it moved up the food chain
— as early as 1945, when based on Fish and Wildlife researches she wrote an
article about it and submitted it to Reader’s Digest, which turned it down. Carson’s 1951 book The
Sea Around Us became a surprise bestseller;
instead of relying on her own research as she had with Under the Sea-Winds, she synthesized the work of other scientists
and added a piquant, quasi-poetic prose style that delighted readers.

The
Sea Around Us was such a hit that it
inspired the reissue of Under the Sea-Winds, Carson sold the movie rights (though she hated the
Lewis Allen documentary film that got released — her contract had given her the
right to “review” the film’s script but not to insist on changes — and, like J.
D. Salinger, she hated the experience of having her work filmed so much she
never again sold movie rights to any of her books), and she got a contract for
a third book on the sea, The Edge of the Sea, based on other scientists’ research and also on
her own explorations of the coastline. Carson used the money to buy a summer
house in Maine and befriended a couple named Stanley and Dorothy Freeman — and,
though they only spent about two months in each other’s physical presence over
a 10-year friendship, Carson and Dorothy Freeman wrote powerful, emotionally
intense letters to each other that were basically a throwback to a 19th
century model of friendship in which people addressed each other in ways that
in the late 20th century would be considered appropriate only for
people who were, or wanted to be, sexually involved with each other. In the
1950’s she briefly considered writing a book about evolution and also one about
the environment called Remembrance of the Earth, as the preliminary studies being done on DDT and
other long-lasting pesticides convinced her that the continued indiscriminate
use of such substances threatened life on earth. She began what became the book
Silent Spring in 1958 but
was slowed up by the cancer that eventually killed her. When Silent Spring was first released in 1962 — her friend William
Shawn published three extended excerpts in The New Yorker months before the book as a whole was available
— it caused a sensation and pretty much set the terms for environmental debate
(on both sides!) that have obtained since. Though the PBS documentary (narrated
movingly by actress Mary-Louise Parker, who plays Carson in readings from her
works and her letters, mostly to Dorothy Freeman) doesn’t stress the point, one
gets the distinct impression that opposition to Carson’s work was motivated as
much by sexism as by corporate and individual self-interest. Male scientists
and corporate leaders were used to being acclaimed as heroes who were changing
the face of the earth to make it better and more habitable for humans, and here
was this woman who’d
previously been known for nice, harmless books about the sea challenging all
that and portraying the captains of industry and what former President Dwight
Eisenhower in his farewell address (right after he warned about the
“military-industrial complex”) called “the scentific-technological elite” and
which he regarded as similarly dangerous, as the potential destroyers of life
on earth. Silent Spring
also was one of the first books to advance the concept later known as
“ecology,” the idea that all life forms on earth are interconnected and
therefore wiping out one seemingly inconvenient form of life could have dire
consequences for other species that humans considered desirable.

The book so
closely set the tone for debate on environmental issues in general and
pesticides in particular that when I did an article on the history of
pesticides for the Holistic Living News in the early 1980’s among the books I consulted,
along with Silent Spring
itself, were tomes called Before Silent Spring and Since Silent Spring — as well as That They May Live, a 1964 response book financed by the pesticide
industry and written under contract to them by Congressmember Jamie L. Whitten
(D-Mississippi), who was also a strong racist whose Congressional seat was
protected when Mississippi lost a seat following the 1960 census by simply
jamming his district together with racial moderate Frank E. Smith’s, thereby
ensuring Smith’s defeat in the next election. (Smith tells this story in his
book Congressman from Mississippi, and in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to these sorts of
shenanigans in their “one person, one vote” decision.) It was ironic, to say
the least, that PBS aired this show the day President Donald Trump signed
executive orders green-lighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines,
using the same sorts of arguments made by Rachel Carson’s opponents 55 years
ago — that potential long-term damage to the environment is utterly
unimportant; what matters is the U.S. economy and jobs here and now —
confirming the anti-environmentalist message of his campaign and also, I
suspect, reinforcing his whole macho concept of leadership. It’s long struck me that
there’s a sexist component in the anti-environmentalist movement, a sense that real
men get their energy by drilling
for oil or digging for coal, and it’s only women and feminized “men” who
advocate for solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources.
Likewise real men
use pestcides and herbicides when they farm, and it’s only women and feminized
“men” who concern themselves with long-term environmental consequences —
though, ironically, at least part of the anti-environmentalism that’s so much a
part of the American Right (less so the Right in other countries) comes from
the arrogant dismissal of it in female author Ayn Rand’s novels and her belief
that any environmental problems created by untrammeled capitalism could be solved
by it as well (like Atlas Shrugged protagonist John Galt’s physics-defying motor that runs on air).

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Last night’s “feature” was the next Abbott and Costello
movie in the sequence, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, which was their second and last film for Warner
Bros. (through an “independent” production company called Woodley Productions).
Sources differ on just how these two films, Jack and the Beanstalk (a sort-of adaptation of the classic fairy tale
which began and ended in black-and-white but the fantasy part was in color à
la The Wizard of Oz) and Abbott
and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, got made
and why. One source on imdb.com says it was because Abbott and Costello wanted
to make films in color and Universal wouldn’t give them the budget (in the
early 1950’s it still cost about twice as much to make a film in color as in
black-and-white); another said that it was a way of creating nest eggs for both
Abbott and Costello, since each of the films would be owned by one of the star
— Jack and the Beanstalk was to
be Costello’s and Captain Kidd
was Abbott’s — though as things turned out Jack and the Beanstalk slipped into the public domain and Captain
Kidd didn’t. Producer Alex Gottlieb (who
had made Abbott and Costello’s star-making films for Universal in the early
1940’s) wisely hired Charles Laughton to play Captain Kidd, since Laughton had
already played him in a 1945 film directed by Rowland V. Lee from a script by
his brother Robert, and while having little to do with the life of the real
Captain Kidd it was a quite entertaining film, well balanced between serious
action drama and camp, despite some major overacting from the cast (even a
normally restrained performer like Randolph Scott, playing the good-guy
romantic lead, got some teeth marks on the scenery). Abbott and
Costello Meet Captain Kidd contains six
songs by Bob Russell and Lester Lee — when the first one came on, a choral
number in which Captain Kidd’s crew sings his praises, Charles joked, “Ah!
Abbott and Costello in The Pirates of Penzance!” He wasn’t far wrong; though Russell and Lee are
hardly in Gilbert and Sullivan’s league as a songwriting team, they came up with
some fun songs (considerably better than the lame ones they wrote for Jack
and the Beanstalk), and Alex Gottlieb’s
casting people came up with two nice-voiced singers to play the romantic leads:
Irish tenor Bill Shirley as Bruce Martingale and big-band singer Fran Warren,
billed as making her movie debut, as his love interest, Lady Jane. (Warren had
sung with the Claude Thornhill band a decade earlier and been the vocalist on
their biggest hit, “A Sunday Kind of Love.”)

The problem with this movie is that
virtually nothing happens; the
characters simply chase each other around sets both representing ships and
shore, and though I nodded off during much of the movie Abbott and Costello
seemed in the parts I did see
more like comic-relief sidekicks in an operetta than stars. The script was
credited to Howard Dimsdale and John Grant, but it doesn’t seem like Grant had
that much to do with it because he was A&C’s go-to guy for “Who’s on
First”-style wordplay and there’s virtually nothing of that sort of thing here.
The director was Charles Lamont, who by then was making most of A&C’s films
at Universal too, and like the rest of the movie he’s O.K. without being
especially inspired. Oddly, it’s only at the end of the film that Dimsdale and
Grant have Charles Laughton and Lou Costello impersonate each other — had they
done it earlier and had Costello fearful both of Kidd killing him and of the
authorities capturing and executing him as a pirate, they would have had the
basis of a film both more entertaining and more funny than the one they made
— though the close-up of Costello imitating Laughton’s pursed-lip scowl is
still a lot of fun and worth having. The plot, in case it matters, casts Kidd
and female pirate Anne Bonney (Hillary Brooke, as good as a villainess here as
she was as Professor Moriarty’s partner in crime in the 1945 Basil
Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green) as sometime partners, sometime rivals (and Brooke’s
relative restraint compares favorably to Laughton’s overacting, which not
surprisingly is even worse here than it was in his more-or-less “serious”
previous performance as Kidd) as Kidd and his crew search for buried treasure
on “Skull Island” (one wonders where are the living dinosaurs and the 50-foot
ape, since “Skull Island” was also the name of the locale of the original King
Kong and its direct sequel, Son
of Kong) and the two nice young kids
playing the romantic leads finally
get together.

Oddly, though one of the reasons this film exists is so Abbott
and Costello could make films together in color, the process was SuperCinécolor
(their budget wouldn’t stretch as far as three-strip Technicolor and
Eastmancolor, the process that studios were allowed to name after themselves as
“WarnerColor,” “Metrocolor,” etc., wasn’t generally available yet) and the
color on the print we were watching (from Turner Classic Movies’ Abbott and
Costello marathon at the end of 2012) was badly faded to the point where
certain scenes looked awfully black-and-white to us. It seems strange that the
current holders of the Warners catalog spent the money to do a vivid color
restoration on Jack and the Beanstalk but have left this one, which isn’t in the public domain, to rot. This film is more
evidence that the bloom was off the rose for Abbott and Costello big-time — one
of the funniest gags is one in which Lou Costello looks out the porthole of
Kidd’s ship and gets drenched with water (a nice variant on the “’Tain’t a fit
night out for man nor beast” gag from Clyde Bruckman’s savagely funny 1933 short
The Fatal Glass of Beer with W.
C. Fields), but even there the writers couldn’t resist the old A&C chestnut
of having Costello call Abbott, who opens the porthole … and nothing happens.
The consensus of the critics in 1952 was that Charles Laughton was over the
hill and through as an actor — and certainly he did nothing to change that
perception the next year, when he turned up as King Herod in the Rita Hayworth
Salomé (based on an alternate
version of the story also used by Massenet in his opera Herodïade, in which Salomé does her dance to ransom John the
Baptist in hopes of receiving him alive, and Herod double-crosses her and
presents him to her dead instead) and overacted so relentlessly he was just
about as funny in this presumably “serious” context as he is in Abbott
and Costello Meet Captain Kidd. Fortunately
Laughton had at least two great performances in great movies in the last decade
of his life — as attorney Sir Wilfred Robarts in Witness for the
Prosecution (1957) and U.S. Senator
Seabright “Seab” Cooley in his last film, Advise and Consent (1962).

Monday, January 23, 2017

I had a rather nervous
evening and spent most of it watching TV, including the first three hours of
the quite good British TV miniseries about the life and reign of Queen
Victoria, called simply Victoria, made in 2016 not by the BBC but by Britain’s commercial television company, ITV — though
certainly in the style we’ve come to know from the British drawing-room dramas,
concentrating on the relationships between the human characters instead of the
sheer spectacle of the monarchy and its court. Victoria became Queen of England
in 1837 following the death of the previous king, William IV, who himself had
acceded to the throne after the 10-year reign of his older brother George IV.
All these people were members of the House of Hanover, which had been imported
from Germany in the 18th century after the fall of the Stuarts to
make sure the United Kingdom stayed safely Protestant — indeed, until
Victoria’s grandfather George III became king in 1760 the Hanover monarchs
spoke German exclusively and carried out the court’s business in that language.
Some of this is reflected on the program in the character of Victoria’s mother,
Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, who in the show is constantly
lapsing into German when addressing her daughter, who has to keep correcting
her and reminding her that as the rulers of Britain they should speak only
English.

The show stars Jenna Coleman as Queen Victoria, and its main dramatic
point is that she took the throne at 18 and a lot of people both in the royal
court and in Parliament, bitterly divided between the “Whig” (Liberal) and
“Tory” (Conservative) parties, thought she was too young and immature for the
job and wanted there to be a regency led by her surviving uncle. Victoria is shown
as fiercely independent, anxious to succeed, chafing at the limitations on the
royal role imposed by the British constitution — she’s shocked to learn that
slavery is still in effect on the island of Jamaica and is upset that she can’t
just issue a royal proclamation abolishing it — and also as incredibly
moralistic. In the first episode, “Doll 123” (named after an actual doll in her
collection which at age 11 she literally crowned when she realized that one day
she would quite likely be queen), she suspects an affair between Lady Flora
Hastings (Alice Orr-Ewing) and another courtier with whom she shared a carriage
ride. She orders two doctors to conduct an “examination” of Lady Flora — it’s
not clear, but at least the implication is there that the doctors are really
performing an abortion on the illicitly pregnant Flora, only the operation goes
horribly wrong and Lady Flora contracts an infection and dies — though the
official story is that she only appeared to be pregnant and really suffered from a tumor. It’s an interesting
plot point that fits given that the word “Victorian” has entered the language
as meaning a period of particularly intense sexual repression and judgmental
“morality” imposed by government fiat.

But the main thrust of the first three
episodes (as often seems to happen in shows like this, in order to start with a
spectacular opening show the PBS telecast jammed the first two episodes into
one two-hour “event” presentation) is Victoria’s relationship with her prime
minister, Lord Melbourne (Rufus Sewell), whom she’s infatuated with even though
he’s almost three times her age and he’s a widower. It’s previously established
that he stayed loyal to his wife even when she ran off with Lord Byron (that Lord Byron?) and, though she’s long dead, in the
film’s kinkiest scene he takes a lock of her hair from a keepsake box and
practically makes love to it. (Ironically, according to historian Robert K.
Massie, Victoria did something similar when her later husband, Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha — who was also her first cousin — died; she had a cast
made of his face and his hand and had them placed next to her bed so she could
reach out, see his face and hold his hand just as she had when he was alive,
and in Cabinet meetings she often asked aloud the WWAD question — “What would
Albert do?”) The third episode, “Brocket Hall,” deals with Melbourne’s
deteriorating political position — his Whig Party loses a vote of confidence in
Parliament and the Tories select Robert Peel as the new prime minister;
Victoria signals the only Tory she’s willing to accept as the head of
government is the Duke of Wellington, who begs off on the ground that he’s too
old; and eventually she forces a constitutional confrontation and insists that
Melbourne stay on — and also the vexing question of just whom Victoria should marry: Prince Albert (pushed on
her by yet another uncle, King Leopold of Belgium), the British Prince George
(Nicholas Agnew), the Russian Grand Duke (Daniel Donskoy), or no one at all.
(Victoria is shown casting several long gazes at the portrait of her
illustrious predecessor, “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth. and wondering whether it
would be best if she followed Elizabeth’s example.)

There are also sequences
dealing with the Chartist rebellions that swept Britain in the 1840’s, whose
platform, known as the People’s Charter, called for universal suffrage for all
men 21 and over (and there were a few especially radical Chartists who
advocated for votes for women as well), a secret ballot, elimination of the requirement
that Members of Parliament be landowners, payment for M.P.’s so working-class
people could afford to serve, redistricting to make legislative districts equal
in population, and new elections every year. The Chartist movement was
violently repressed by the authorities, and many of the movement’s leaders were
deported to Australia (where some of them continued their activities) while
others were put on trial for treason — though eventually, starting with the
Second Reform Act of 1867 (sponsored by Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli
under Victoria’s reign), some of the Chartists’ demands ultimately became law.
There’s a spectacular scene of Victoria herself being confronted by Chartist
demonstrators as she unveils a monument to her uncle the Earl of Kent — an
interesting counterpoint to the fooforaw going on in Washington, D.C. right now
as the Trump administration declares war on the media for daring to report that
the crowds for his inauguration in 2017 were considerably smaller than for
President Obama’s first inaugural in 2009.

It’s nice to see a “Royal porn” show
that actually acknowledges the working-class movements of the time — indeed, in
1842 a Chartist named John Francis actually took a shot at Queen Victoria, and
she rode along the same route the next day in hopes of provoking him into a
second attempt so the authorities could arrest him. It’s also fascinating that
Victoria goes into a hissy-fit when she’s told that she has to replace her
ladies-in-waiting that were married to Whig politicians and install Tories’
wives instead — she thinks, not unreasonably, that just because one party lost
an election that shouldn’t determine who gets to serve in her royal household. Victoria, judging from the first three (of eight) episodes,
is a quite good bit of political TV, drenched in past-is-brown orthodoxies
(explainable by the fact that when it occurred the palaces were still lit by
candles; Victoria tries to have gas put in but one of the palace staff burns
her hand trying to light the gas jet and Victoria’s mom peremptorily orders the
conversion stopped, especially since the gas installation also disturbed the
palace’s rats and they started migrating to the living quarters) but vividly
acted in that marvelously understated way British actors have of vivifying
their country’s history.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

The two “Vintage Sci-Fi” films shown last night in Golden
Hill were Destination Inner Space and
the original 1966 Fantastic Voyage.
Destination Inner Space was a
bizarre 1966 production credited to a bizarre assortment of companies — Harold
Goldman Associates, Television
Enterprises Corporation, United
Pictures (not United Artists Pictures, just United Pictures!) — and was so cheesy the DVD being
shown was a 2011 reissue coming from a company called Cheezy Flicks Entertainment (http://cheezyflicks.com), though their total
list includes some older films that may not be deathless masterpieces but
aren’t really “cheesy” either, including Rowland V. Lee’s 1945 Captain
Kidd with Charles Laughton and Randolph
Scott, and the estimable 1962 British horror-sci-fi film The Day of
the Triffids.Destination Inner
Space is one of those bad films with the
makings of — well, maybe not a great
film but at least an entertaining one; the premise is that a spaceship from
another planet lands under water
near the Sea Lab, an experimental
underwater laboratory where the usual assorted motley crew of humans live and
work together researching underseas life. Among the people playing human beings
are at least two actors with connections to considerably more illustrious
people: Gary Merrill, fourth (and last) husband of Bette Davis and co-star with
her in three films, including All About Eve; and Sheree North, who in 1955 got to make a film
with Betty Grable called How to Be Very, Very Popular after the originally set co-star, Marilyn Monroe,
walked out at the last minute. (Marjorie Rosen in her book Popcorn
Venus couldn’t resist the pun that the film
was “very, very unpopular” and took Sheree North’s career with it; 20th
Century-Fox pretty much abandoned her and made Jayne Mansfield their “next
Marilyn” instead.)

The star — or at least the top-billed actor — of Destination
Inner Space is Scott Brady, who plays
Commander Wayne (if he has a first name, we never learn it), a hot-shot diver
who on a previous mission alienated Dr. LaSatier (Gary Merrill) and some of the
other personnel as well. Wayne and his diving partner, Dr. Renee Peron (Sheree
North), whom he works with despite the usual sexist “digs” about the bad luck
involved in having a woman living
in a confined space with so many men and doing the sort of work men were meant
to do. In fact, they sail together under the sea in a preposterous open-cockpit runabout instead of the enclosed bathysphere we were
expecting, and one wonders how they deal with the water pressure at the depths
they’re exploring. (When I looked this film on imdb.com the review that came up
was from the current owner of this prop, though he didn’t say whether it was a
model or built full-sized.) The humans invade the cockpit of the whatsit and
find what at first looks like some sort of metal shell or bomb, which turns out
actually to be the egg of a giant sea creature (listed in the credits only as
“The Thing” and played by Ron Burke), which almost instantly hatches, assumes
what we presume is its full adult size and is one of the most ridiculous screen
monsters of all time. The film’s director, Francis D. Lyon, working from a
screenplay by Arthur C. Pierce (a name I couldn’t help ridiculing as the
credits roll — “Written by Arthur C. — oh, Pierce”), shows that he’d never seen a Val Lewton movie in
his life, nor even The Creature from the Black Lagoon (not that
great a movie, but its director, Jack Arnold, at least knew enough to “tease”
us by showing the monster in bits and pieces before giving us a full-frontal on
it.

Also, while the monster in the film’s poster art is a pretty uniform green
(making his design even more evocative, shall we say, of the Creature from the
Black Lagoon than it is in the film), the one we see in the movie is a glorious
riot of neon-bright colors that makes it look like the work of a piñata maker
with a particularly demented imagination (and makes one wonder why, instead of
harpooning the creature, the staff of the Sea Lab don’t put blindfolds on, whack it with sticks and
wait for it to break and the candy to come out). The film’s imdb.com page
credits Richard Cassarino as “amphibian creator,” but it looks like he just
copied Paul Blaisdell’s design for the generic American International monster
and added a few fins and other protuberances to suggest “oceanicity.” I
couldn’t help but laugh every time this gloriously colored animated piñata came
out even though its appearance was clearly supposed to scare me silly — well,
at least the “silly” part is accurate. About all that happens in Destination
Inner Space is a series of chase scenes
between the monster and the humans around the Sea Lab — occasionally the monster gets to go back in the
water and swim around for a bit, only to re-emerge inside the Sea Lab — and the people keep harpooning the monster, which
keeps surviving the assaults until sheer exhaustion and the end of the film’s
85-minute running time intervene and the great piñata finally dies, much to the
displeasure of Dr. LaSatier, who in the best flaring tones Gary Merrill no
doubt learned from his ex says they should have kept the creature alive for
study instead of knocking it off, an embarrassing tic of movie scientists in monster films ever since
Robert Cornthwaite’s looney-tunes scientist in the 1951 film The
Thing. Done with some sort of flair for genuine fright, Destination
Inner Space might have been at least a
passably good monster film — and though the original posters ballyhooed that it
was in color, it might have actually been scarier in black-and-white — but as
it stands it’s not quite stupid enough to be camp but not well done enough to
be entertaining on its own merits, either — and one wonders why the color of
that deep-sea exploration craft keeps changing from mustard yellow to orange to
red (the guy who owns the prop says it’s red in real life).

The next film on the program was the 1966 Fantastic
Voyage, a film with a provocative premise
that I remember seeing when it first came out. The setting is pure Cold War
propaganda: both the U.S. and our Cold War adversaries (carefully unnamed in
the committee-written script — Otto Klement and Jay Lewis Bixby get credit for
the story, David Duncan for “adaptation” and Harry Kleiner for the actual script,
which strongly supports my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a
movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers — with Richard
Fleischer, whose last name is also the German word for “butcher,” as director)
have figured out a way to miniaturize people and other matter to the size of
microbes so entire armies can be packed in a suitcase, smuggled wherever they
need to go and then reassembled at full size without the bothersome necessity
of shipping troops and equipment to a country you wish to invade. The problem
is that the process only works for exactly one hour, after which the
miniaturized people and equipment automatically revert to normal size.
(Interestingly, this was also the premise of Henry Kuttner’s original story
“Dr. Cyclops” — a German scientist, Dr. Thorkeld, has set up a lab in Argentina
to work on shrinking people and military hardware so der Führer can smuggle armies into the New World and invade —
but when his story was filmed in 1940 that was abandoned and Dr. Thorkeld,
played by Albert Dekker, became just a generic mad scientist instead.)

There is a way to make the miniaturization last longer than
than an hour, but the only person on earth who knows how to do it is Dr. Jan
Benes (Jean Du Val), escapee from the Iron Curtain, and when he’s on his way to
the secret lab of the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF) (actually
“played” by the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, though burnished to a
beautiful, shiny gloss without the detritus of tobacco, alcohol, junk food,
vomit and urine that usually afflicts real sports arenas) — as one imdb.com
contributor noted, instead of sneaking him in the dead of night in an unmarked
car the CMDF people have organized a full motorcade with police escort that’s
ridiculously easy for the other side to spot and attack — an enemy car
deliberately crashes into his and the great scientist is left with a nasty clot
in his brain that’s going to kill him. The clot is unreachable by conventional
brain surgery, but if a submarine vessel and crew can be miniaturized and
injected into Benes, they can travel up his arteries to the clot, burn it out
with a laser beam, save Benes and escape through the venous system … The crew
consists of Grant (Stephen Boyd, best known as the villain Messala in the 1959 Ben-Hur but good-looking and square-jawed enough to be a
movie hero seven years later), the commander; Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance)
and Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), who are supposed to provide the medical
expertise; Dr. Duval’s assistant, Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), whom he insists
has necessary expertise to help him but of course is really there only to provide the teenage straight guys in
the audience something to ogle (this was her first major film role and she
spends most of the movie looking straight ahead at the camera with a blank
expression, but then Welch didn’t become a star because of her face); and captains Donald Reid (Arthur O’Connell) and
Bill Owens (William Redfield).

The craft they’re supposed to take their
“fantastic voyage” in is called the Proteus (a name that takes one of the crew members by
surprise until he’s told, “That’s the name of this vessel; sounds better than
calling it the U91O35”), and in a series of annoying stages they’re
successively miniaturized and injected into Benes. A number of people at the
screening wondered what might have happened if someone had walked through the
staging area and put his or her foot down in the wrong place at the wrong time
… oops. Once the Proteus and its
crew get inside Benes they have to deal with all sorts of cool phenomena; the
script posits that blood is actually clear in color — it only looks red because of the presence of red blood cells,
which float by like the bubbles in a lava lamp (though it occurred to me that
the historical sequence might have gone the other way around — maybe the makers
of lava lamps figured out how to do it from the way the effects were done in
this movie) —and the blood cells floating in the cool plasma are either red
(arterial cells carrying oxygen), blue (venous cells waiting for oxygen
molecules to be attached to them so they can be sent out the arteries again and
deliver the oxygen to the rest of the body that needs it), or white
(infection-fighting cells). The crew members are also warned about antibodies,
which we are told will “read” the Proteus and its crew as infectious microbes and clump onto them to kill the
enemy invader — and in the big scene everyone remembers Cora Peterson is the
victim of an antibody attack as she and the other crew members take one of
their extended trips outside the Proteus (in this case to get the seaweed-like tendrils, which are supposed to
be lymphatic cells, out of the ship’s vents so it doesn’t overheat) and the
males have to pull crystallized antibodies off Raquel Welch’s body and her
skin-tight white jumpsuit. One woman at the screening wondered why, with at
least three other possible candidates, the antibodies picked on her and left
the males alone — to which I replied, “That’s a 1960’s movie for you. Even the
antibodies are sexist.”

Of course, the writing committee couldn’t resist yet
another one of the clichés of the commando crew in a remote location sub-genre of the war movie (which, let’s face it, is basically
what this is): they have one of the crew members be a traitor, deliberately
sabotaging the mission, and while it’s supposed to be a big secret it’s not
hard to figure out that the traitor is Dr. Michaels. He’s got a shaved head
like Erich von Stroheim, he’s being played by Donald Pleasance with the smarmiest
version of a British accent the actor could come up with, and he’s openly
mocking when Dr. Duval, Grant and the other crew members quote inspirational
poetry to the effect that their “fantastic voyage” through a person’s blood
system is bringing them closer to God. (It was Charles who noted that part of
the film’s Cold War politics was to have the religious believers be the good
guys and the skeptic be the bad guy — remember in the Cold War our enemy was
officially defined as not just Communism, but “Godless Communism,” and that’s
when “In God We Trust” was put on our money and the original Pledge of
Allegiance was defiled with the words “under God,” telling me and other
non-believers that we can not be real Americans.) Dr. Michaels finally gets his
when he and the Proteus are
devoured by a white corpuscle, and the other four escape by sneaking out of the
corner of Benes’ eye, where they’re transferred to a microscope slide and then
returned to the staging area (an assembly of hexagons that in at least some of
Fleischer’s shots look like Michael Jackson and a batch of chorus boys are
going to emerge and do a dance on it), where they resume full size.

Fantastic
Voyage isn’t quite as tacky as Destination Inner Space — after all, it was the production of a major studio
(20th Century-Fox) and had actors you’ve heard of, as well as some
awesomely beautiful special effects (alternating with some pretty tacky ones) —
but it’s not a great movie either. The acting honors are taken by Edmond
O’Brien, who plays the general in charge of the whole secret project and
delivers a performance of power and authority that shames everyone locked
inside that little tin can of a sub (which frankly looks more like a
particularly ornate coat button than anything else). Raquel Welch does what she
was put in the movie to do — there’s an especially hot scene in which she
changes out of a form-fitting overall into a form-fitting white thing under it
that at least shows off her cleavage — and there’s a reason why the antibody attack on her is the big scene in
this movie that everyone who’s seen it remembers. An imdb.com “Trivia” poster
has this tale about that scene: “When filming the scene where the other crew
members remove attacking antibodies from Ms. Peterson for the first time,
director Richard Fleischer allowed
the actors to grab what they pleased. Gentlemen all, they specifically avoided
removing them from Raquel Welch‘s
breasts, with an end result that the director described as a ‘Las Vegas
showgirl’ effect. Fleischer pointed this out to the cast members — and on the
second try, the actors all reached for her breasts. Finally the director
realized that he would have to choreograph who removed what from where, and the
result is seen in the final cut.”

The imdb.com contributors also noted the plot
holes and inconsistencies involved in the story, particularly the interchanges
between miniaturized and non-miniaturized matter, which were resolved when a
science-fiction writer with considerably more of a reputation than any who
worked on the actual script, Isaac Asimov, was hired to do the novelization of
the film. Asimov accepted the job if he’d be given the right to fix the plot
holes and get the story into a form that made sense, and because of delays
caused by the time it took to get the effects right his novel came out six
months before the movie did — which begs the question why the film’s writers
didn’t use the delays to edit their script to incorporate Asimov’s changes. It’s
also why a lot of science-fiction and film historians got the wrong impression
that Fantastic Voyage was based
on an Asimov novel. Fantastic Voyage
is a fun film, ridiculously uneven — there are remarkable sequences of almost
unearthly beauty alternating with ludicrous and risible ones — but it still
packs something of the original punch even though the plot premise virtually
defines “far-fetched.” Incidentally, the basic premise was used for an animated
cartoon shown on Saturday mornings for kids; it ran for 17 episodes in 1968-69
and changed the meaning of CMDF from Combined Miniaturization Deterrent Forces
to Combined Miniature Defense Force, changed the name of the craft they sailed
in from Proteus to Voyager, and also extended the time limit on the
miniaturization from one hour to 12.

Saturday, January 21, 2017

Our “feature” movie last night was The Accountant, one of the two Blu-Ray discs I bought at my last
Vons run along with Deepwater Horizon — and as much a pleasant surprise as Deepwater Horizon had been a deep (pardon the pun) disappointment. The
blurb on the box made it seem like a knockoff of John Grisham’s The
Firm, only with accountants instead of
lawyers as the members of a secretly Mob-controlled service firm — but it
turned out to be considerably richer and deeper than that, and an appropriate
choice for the first movie we’ve watched under TrumpAmerica. Indeed, The
Accountant actually has a direct connection
to the Trump administration; Steven Mnuchin, who went from working for Goldman
Sachs to running a hedge fund that, among other things, funded several movies,
is Trump’s appointee for Secretary of the Treasury. That’s a surprise given the
very jaundiced view of capitalism
presented in this film! Directed by Gavin O’Connor from a script by Bill
Dubuque (itself a good sign, given my general field theory of cinema that the
quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers), The
Accountant begins with a shot of a troubled
kid (Seth Lee) and his relatively more normal brother (Jake Presley) in the
office of a neurologist (Jason Davis) who says he doesn’t want to assign
labels, though the child we see is definitely autistic. This scene takes place
in 1989 and the gist is that the neurologist wants the boy to live at his
center, but the parents don’t want that because dad is in the Army and gets
moved around a lot, and they want to keep both their sons with them wherever
they happen to be. Then the film flashes forward to the present, with Internal
Revenue Service agent Ray King (J. K. Simmons, who reminded me a lot of Dann
Florek’s performance as Captain Donald Craigin in Law and Order:
Special Victims Unit) summoning one of his
analysts, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), to his office to ask why
she’s never sought a promotion to agent herself. He already knows the reason
why: she was involved in the drug scene in her teens and committed attempted
murder at 17, then served her time, then cleaned up her act and applied for the
IRS — but she put on her application that she had no criminal record, and that
itself is a felony.

With that hanging over her head, he’s able to order her to
take on the high-risk assignment of locating “The Accountant,” a mystery man
who travels all over the world giving accounting services to the Mafia, drug
cartels and the like. As King explains, “Say you’re the head of the Sinaloa
Cartel. Now the cartels count their money in eighteen-wheelers. But one sunny
Mexican day, your in-house money scrubber comes to you and says you’re $30
million light. Who can you trust to do the forensic accounting to track your stolen
cash? Deloitte & Touche? H & R Block?” The mystery accountant uses the
name “Christian Wolff” — one of a series of aliases he’s taken from the names
of famous mathematicians (including Lewis Carroll, for whom math was his day
job even though today he’s most famous for writing Alice in
Wonderland) — and of course he’s a) played
by the film’s star, Ben Affleck, and b) he’s the grown-up version of the
autistic kid we saw in the prologue, and in case we forget that O’Connor and
Dubuque give us a few flashbacks to remind us. While all this is going on,
another mystery man is holding up people in finance and ordering them at
gunpoint not to make certain sorts of stock trades — in one sequence he sticks
up someone in his car in his parking lot and tells him he’ll be back to kill
him unless he stops trading certain stocks short — “and I regularly read the [Wall
Street] Journal, so I’ll know!,” is his
parting line. At the suggestion of his handler, whom we don’t see and only hear
as a British-accented phone voice, Christian decides to take a quasi-legitimate
job for a change with a company called Living Robotics. A junior accountant at
this firm, Dana Cummings (played by Anna Kendrick, who’s been criticized but I though she was wonderful!), has spotted missing funds
in the company’s accounts and the company hires Christian to trace the
shortages — only it turns out Christian has done his job too well: he traces
them to the chief financial officer as well as the CEO, who are looting the
company in preparation for its IPO. The Accountant has its flaws; Christian is portrayed not only as a
high-functioning autistic accountant but also as an action hero on the level of
James Bond or Jason Bourne — at one point he massacred nine members of the
Gambino crime family out of a personal vendetta, and at the end he takes on the
corrupt CEO of Living Robotics and manages to wipe out the guy’s entire
security detail even though there are about nine of them and they’re as well
armed as he is. The only one he spares is the head of the guy’s security, Brax
(Jon Bernthal), who [spoiler alert!]
turns out to be Christian’s long-lost younger brother.

Along the way Christian
and Dana, who’s pretty clearly also a high-functioning autistic, drift into an
affair and he lets Dana into his sanctum sanctorum, a trailer in which he keeps his most precious
possessions, including original paintings by Renoir and Pollock and a first
issue of Action Comics which he’s
received as in-kind payments from members of his criminal clientele. The
Accountant is a slow-moving thriller, more
coherent than the 1997 Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson (who was also the first star considered for this film
too) but somewhat reminiscent of it, but it’s a good deal better as a film; it
maintains audience interest and is a great showcase role for Affleck, who has
one of the most wretched list of credits of anyone with a major-star reputation
(whatever possessed him to agree to play Jack Dupree in the atrocious 2007
“comedy” Smokin’ Aces, or
Batman?) but every so often takes a role that convinces us he’s really a great
actor. He did it under Allan Coulter’s direction in the 2006 film Hollywoodland (in which he superbly portrayed George Reeves, the
actor who played Superman in the 1950’s TV series — one imdb.com “trivia” contributor
argues that this makes Affleck the only actor who’s played both Superman and
Batman, but that really seems like stretching a point to me) and he’s done it
again here under O’Connor’s direction. (According to imdb.com O’Connor is
scheduled to direct the next film Affleck and his filmmaking partner Matt Damon
co-star in, Father-Daughter Time.)
Christian is one of the most multidimensional characters ever put on screen,
working for criminals but also donating generous chunks of his ill-gotten gains
to the research center where he was diagnosed back in 1989 (and the final scene
shows the clinic admitting a new boy and we learn that the dispatcher who gave
Christian his orders is actually a long-term adult patient there), and he’s
likable enough we root for him and Dana to stay together (even though they
don’t — the last we see of Christian is him hooking up his trailer to a truck
and driving off for parts unknown) — and Affleck plays him brilliantly,
treading the thin edge of audience sympathy without making him so likable we can’t believe he’d do what the script
tells us he’s done.

Though I think writer Dubuque went a bit too far in making
Christian a super-action hero in addition to all his other aspects, otherwise The
Accountant is that rarity: a modern movie
that has the best aspects of the classics while still taking advantage of the
greater freedom and honesty with which certain aspects of life, especially
sexual ones, can be treated on the modern screen. (Having said that, I still
give brownie points to O’Connor and Dubuque for allowing us to take the sexual
relationship between Christian and Dana at face value and not showing Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick slobbering
over each other.) The Accountant
is a compelling thriller with a surprisingly cynical attitude towards
capitalism, especially given that it was not only produced at the dawn of the
Trump era but actually was co-produced by one of his Cabinet appointees, and I
especially liked the scene in which Living Robotics’ corrupt CEO Lamar Blackburn
(John Lithgow, marvelous as usual) goes all Ayn Rand on us and tries to
convince Christian he should be let alone because he’s a capitalist superman
who’s creating so much value and worth in the world. “I’m fond of Dana. But I
restore lives, not Dana! Me! Men, women, children, I give them hope, make them
whole. Do you even know what that’s like?” Blackburn says — and both to
eliminate him and to shut him up, Christian calmly drills a shot to his chest,
killing him instantly. Take that,
Howard Roark, Hank Rearden and John Galt!!!

Friday, January 20, 2017

Our “feature” last night was actually a surprisingly
disappointing movie: Deepwater Horizon,
directed by Peter Berg from a story by Matthew Sand and a script by him and
Matthew Michael Carnahan based on a New York Times news article by David Rohde and Stephanie Saul in
turn based on the infamous blowout of the exploratory oil well Deepwater
Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico off the
Louisiana coast on April 20, 2010. The central characters of the film are
technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and his immediate supervisor on the
rig, Jimmy Harrell (a surprisingly grizzled Kurt Russell), along with a woman
driller named Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) and a couple of bad guys from the
companies sponsoring the drilling, British Petroleum and TransOcean (the
company that actually owned the drilling rig), Kaluza (Brad Leland) and Vidrine
(John Malkovich), who refuse to let Harrell and Williams do the tests on the
cement that’s supposed to be the last line of protection against a blowout
because they don’t want to spend either the money or the time on this last
precaution to make sure the well is safe. The movie I would have liked to see about the Deepwater
Horizon is about what happened after the well blew out, 11 people died and BP and
TransOcean spent the next 87 days trying to figure out how to put out the fire
that was consuming the rig and stop the release of billions of barrels of oil
from the failed well.

Instead the film they actually made focused on the
operation of the Deepwater Horizon
and the first day of the incident, and the main focus was the personal heroism
of Harrell and Williams in putting their own lives at risk to evacuate the Deepwater
Horizon safely before any more people died.
Deepwater Horizon (the movie)
contains some awesomely beautiful shots of the actual undersea drilling (the
rig was designed to be “semi-submersible” and was essentially a barge — it was
built in South Korea and moved across the Pacific to Freeport, Texas and
thereafter into the Gulf of Mexico for use — and it was designed to drill 3 ½
miles under the ocean’s surface, the deepest oil well ever dug) and the fire
that consumed the rig, but they’re stuck in to the middle of some of the
sorriest scenes of human activity ever filmed. Aside from the principals, the
people in the movie blur into an indistinguishable mass of macho guys, all talking at once in the most
incomprehensible sound mix ever released on a major film since the first
version of Heaven’s Gate and
spouting so much oil-drillers’ jargon the film needs a lot of explanatory
titles just to give the non-oil driller audience some clue about what’s supposed to be going on and what in
fact is going wrong with what’s
going on. This film’s script is more elaborately “planted” than just about
anything made since the 1940’s, and while I generally like the way writers in
the classic Hollywood era set up clues for how the plot was going to turn, this
movie overdid it — especially in the early scene in which Mike Williams and his
wife (Kate Hudson) watch as their daughter prepares a school project about “My
Dad’s Job,” and to illustrate it she upends a Coca-Cola can, stabs it open with
a small pipe, then pours honey down the pipe (the honey represents the
“drilling mud” poured down an oil well to put pressure on the oil and get it to
come out) and seals it with a pencil to show how a well is capped — only the
combined pressure of the soda and the honey in the Coke can causes a burst that
prefigures the real-life well blowout to come.Deepwater Horizon is apparently the second of at least three movies in
which Peter Berg has directed Mark Wahlberg in stories of survival based on
real life — the first was Lone Survivor (2013), about a raid in Afghanistan against a Taliban leader, and the
most recent is Patriots’ Day
(2017), a story about the real-life bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 —
and though there are stray bits of anti-corporate commentary in Deepwater
Horizon (which reminded Charles of the 1943
German film Titanic, which pitted
a lone German-born ship’s officer against the captain and the head of the White
Star Line, on whose pursuit of a world’s record Atlantic crossing the disaster
is blamed), for the most part it’s just another war movie, albeit one in which
the good guys are coming under fire from a force of nature they’ve
inadvertently unleashed rather than a human enemy. Deepwater Horizon comes at a curious juncture in the Zeitgeist — there are a lot of ironies in this, of all films, being the last one Charles and I
watched together in the pre-Trump era — given that like the rest of the Republican
Party, Donald Trump seems not only opposed to but actually revolted by the
whole concept of renewable energy. If there’s one thing Deepwater
Horizon does right, it’s how well it
dramatizes the whole association between oil drilling and the macho concepts of manliness and virtue, a concept that’s
at the heart of the American Right’s idea of energy policy. Real men, the mentality holds, get their energy by doing
vivid, intense, life-threatening things like drilling for oil or digging for
coals; it’s only feminized wimps that hang solar panels or put up windmills —
and given how determined the Trump administration is to focus America’s energy
future almost exclusively on fossil fuels, it’s likely its policies will (to
paraphrase Che Guevara’s famous line) create two, three, a thousand Deepwater
Horizon incidents.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

I watched a PBS American
Experience broadcast on “The Assassination
of Abraham Lincoln” which was actually filmed in 2009 (do they rerun this every
time there’s a Presidential transition?) and written, produced and directed by
Barak (no “c”) Goodman. I was worried that they’d try to remodel the history of
the Lincoln assassination and pass John Wilkes Booth off as one lone nut, when
in fact Lincoln was killed as part of a conspiracy by Confederate diehards
hoping to achieve by decapitating the U.S. government what they had failed to
win on the battlefields of the Civil War. Goodman’s program noted that in
mid-August 1864 Lincoln was convinced he was going to lose his re-election
campaign to Democratic nominee George McClellan, the bizarrely incompetent
general who’d done his best (inadvertently) to lose the Civil War on the
battlefield and was now running as a peace candidate — until the big campaigns
of Generals Grant and Sherman in the south, and particularly Sherman’s capture
of Atlanta on August 31, 1864, convinced Northern voters that the war was just
about won and they should stay the course.

The conspiracy included three actual
assassins: Booth, who was picked to kill Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre because as
an actor who had frequently performed there his presence there would not
attract suspicion (anyone seeing him around the theatre would presumably think
he was just rehearsing for a future production); John Powell, who assaulted
Secretary of State William Seward with a knife and literally severed his cheek
from his face, but Seward survived (and not surprisingly the original newspaper
accounts of Lincoln’s assassination directly made the connection between it and
the attack on Seward), though with a bad facial scar he had for the rest of his
life; and George Atzerodt, who was supposed to kill Vice-President Andrew
Johnson but lost his nerve and got drunk instead. (As I noted in my comments on
the movie The Conspirator — about the
trial of boarding-house owner Mary Surratt for allegedly being part of the
conspiracy, though the only evidence they had against her was a number of the
conspirators were living at her boarding house and her son John was involved — one of the many ironies of the assassination
plot was that Johnson, a notorious alcoholic who got his Presidency off to a
bad start when he delivered his first speech after Lincoln’s death clearly
“under the influence,” escaped the plot because his would-be assassin was also
fond of the bottle.)One point Goodman made was that Booth identified himself
with the historical Brutus, the lead assassin of Julius Caesar; Booth’s father
had been named Junius Brutus Booth (and he too had been an actor, as were
Booth’s brothers Edwin and Junius, Jr. — indeed Goodman points out that the
Booth family was one of those in which brothers took opposing sides in the
Civil War: Edwin played most of his engagements in the North and supported the
Union, while John Wilkes played in the South and endorsed the Confederate
cause). Goodman depicts the Booths as an acting dynasty, like such later
families as the Barrymores, the Powers and the Fondas, though he does not mention that Edwin Booth was considerably more popular —
indeed, at the time a lot of people thought John Wilkes Booth had killed
Lincoln just to do something that would
make him more famous than his brother. (The 1955 film Prince of Players, a biopic of Edwin Booth with Richard Burton playing him,
is largely about the career fallout and blacklisting Edwin suffered after his
brother killed Lincoln and he was blamed.) Indeed, The Conspirator included a bonus DVD that had one of the most bizarre
historical artifacts ever: a postcard advertising a production of Shakespeare’s
play Julius Caesar with all three Booth
brothers appearing. No fiction writer would dare make up a tale of one of the
most notorious political assassins of all time acting in a play about another
of the most notorious political assassinations of all time!

The show was
generally well done, though it made the conspiracy seem less extensive than it
really was and it ducked the question posed by the film The Conspirator, which was largely about the decision of U.S. Secretary of
War Edwin Stanton to try the alleged conspirators not in a regular court but in
what amounted to a military tribunal. It also covered the enormous outpouring
of grief that accompanied the special train that took the coffins of Lincoln
and his son Willie (who’d died in 1862) from Washington, D.C. to Springfield,
Illinois — though it also mentioned that the Union victory in the Civil War and
Lincoln’s assassination did not heal
the political polarization that had brought on the war in the first place and
still hung on when Andrew Johnson (picked by Lincoln as his running mate as a
gesture of unity to the South, since he was a Senator from the secessionist
state of Tennessee but had refused to leave the U.S. Senate when his state seceded)
pursued such a “soft” Reconstruction policy, including signing on to the
Southern states’ “Black Codes” aimed at returning African-Americans to
near-slave status, that Northern Republicans accused him of Confederate
sympathies and ultimately impeached him when he fired Edwin Stanton (whose
honest management of the War Department was credited by a lot of Northerners
with having made the Union victory possible) from his Cabinet.

I put on Arts & Entertainment
for the last episode of Scientology and the Aftermath, the eight-part “reality” series hosted by apostate
Scientologist Leah Remini and this time featuring, instead of ex-Scientologists
(aside from Mike Rinder, who had once been Scientology’s principal “enforcer”
until he got thrown out of the church),
reporters who had covered Scientology and been victims of its take-no-prisoners
attitude towards its critics. (The longer this show has aired, the more it’s
shown how Scientology head David Miscavige and President-elect Donald Trump are
really alike in their thin-skinned natures and the viciousness with which they
respond to all criticism. At least two
letter-writers in this morning’s Los Angeles Times have commented that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and
Bailey Circus hasn’t really closed — it’s just moved to Washington, D.C., only
now the ringmaster is one of the clowns.) One of the three people featured in
this episode was Lawrence Wright, journalist who first wrote against
Scientology in The New Yorker and then
expanded his articles into a book called Going Clear that was largely about the disillusionment of writer-director
Paul Haggis (Crash) and ultimate
departure from Scientology, and who noted that “most religions don’t have
secrets” (as another anti-Scientology writer once commented, the Roman Catholic
Church doesn’t charge you $100,000 before they let you read the Book of
Genesis; in Scientology you’re told that you have to reach “Operating Thetan
Level III” before you’re psychologically well-developed enough to handle the
tale of mad scientist Xenu and the origin of all human problems in his
dastardly experiments on the planet Teegeeack, now known as Earth) and
“Scientology is a religion that locks you in from the inside.”

Another was Ray
Jeffrey, an attorney who took the case of Debbie Cook and her husband, Wayne
Baumgarten, when they were sued by the Church of Scientology; Cook, Jeffrey
explained, was “a victim of her own success” as head of the Flag Land Base, the
pinnacle of the Sea Organization (Scientology’s governing clergy, reporting to
David Miscavige, who runs the church as chair of the Religious Technology
Corporation, which holds the copyrights to all the writings of church founder
L. Ron Hubbard); she was summoned to the Scientology Vatican in Hemet,
California (though the city government of Hemet tweeted the program producers
to stress that the Scientology base camp is not in Hemet but in an unincorporated stretch of Riverside County
just northeast of it) and got to experience Miscavige’s management-by-assault
style up close and personal. A third interviewee was perhaps the quirkiest:
ex-Moonie turned cult deprogrammer Steve Hoxsan, who recalled doing a tour with
an apostate ex-Scientologist and comparing notes on how similar the cult
indoctrinations were in both groups, including controlling every waking moment
of the cult members’ lives (and keeping them awake as long as possible because
sleep deprivation itself is a powerful form of mind control), giving them
enormous amounts of esoteric material to read and regurgitate on command (while
cramming them so full of this sort of information that they never have time to
read anything else or to think critically about it), keeping them from any
other sources of information and telling them essentially that the rest of the
world is lying 24/7 and only the cult
leaders and his or her authorities are to be trusted. It occurred to me that
this sort of indoctrination goes far beyond cults; as I’ve written in these
pages before, medical schools do the same sort of thing to their students, and
even beyond that there have been entire countries, including Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union (especially
under Stalin) and Communist China (especially under Mao), that have been run as
cults, with the added evil that no one chose to be in the cult: they were just inducted into it and
subjected to its power by being born and living in the wrong country at the
wrong time. Mixed in with the interviews were a number of questions Remini and
Rinder had received on Reddit, most of them pretty obvious, including one about
Scientology’s attitude towards homosexuality — which, according to Remini and
Rinder, is publicly O.K. but privately, or not so privately, condemns it as one
of the lower elements on L. Ron Hubbard’s “Tone Scale” of human behavior —
though they did not mention that
Hubbard drove his Gay son Quentin to suicide.

I’ll acknowledge that the massive
amounts of negative information about Scientology that have surfaced over the
last decade have changed my point of view about it from regarding it as a silly
phenomenon but one that mainly harmed people by taking their money, to a sinister
cult comparable to the Moonies, Children of God etc. Indeed, the Church of
Scientology is literally worth billions of dollars, largely because Hubbard
made the conscious decision that instead of recruiting members from the
down-and-out (as the original Christians and many other more recent cults had
done), he would seek members from the upper socioeconomic strata to make sure
they would have the ability to pay the Church large amounts of money for its
“services.” He also consciously recruited celebrities to serve both as
financial supports for the Church and as walking, talking advertisements —
Remini remembered that when she was on the TV series The King of Queens she was under intense pressure from the Church of
Scientology to recruit her co-star, Kevin James, only he already had a religion
that suited him and he was quite happy with, and he wasn’t about to abandon it
for anything else. One point Scientology has pushed in its recruitment is that
it doesn’t regard itself as an exclusive faith — it tells people they can stay
a Christian, Jew, Muslim or whatever they are and also be a Scientologists —
even though its internal documents say that Scientologists are expected to
embrace it “to the exclusion of other faiths” — which hasn’t stopped Louis Farrakhan,
of all people, from publicly embracing the technology of Dianetics and
Scientology as a way Nation of Islam members can make themselves better Muslims
(there’s a bizarre clip of him saying just that in this final program!). Though
this series was supposed to stop at the first eight episodes, Remini dropped a
big hint at the end of this one that she may continue it — and if she does I
hope she goes into the biggest point she failed to mention this time around:
the enormous dossiers the Church of Scientology has on all of its members through their E-meter “auditing” sessions,
which the Church can use in any way it likes because Scientological auditing,
unlike the conventional psychotherapy it resembles, is not protected by confidentiality restrictions.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Last night Lifetime offered a “world premiere” of something
called Open Marriage, a TV-movie from
our old friends at MarVista Entertainment, directed by Sam Irvin from a script
by Jason Byers and apparently shot under the working title To Have
and to Kill. I’d been determined to watch
this movie ever since I saw the promos, mainly because — unusually for a
Lifetime movie — it features two devastatingly hot guys, Tilky Jones and Jason
Tobias — and of course I spent the whole movie hoping that they’d dump their
female spouses and hook up with each other! The plot: Becca (Nikki Leigh) is a
doctor with a killer work schedule who wants a child and is getting worried
because her husband Ron (Tilky Jones) doesn’t seem capable of giving her one —
not that they’ve had sex in quite a while. Ron is a struggling builder trying
to put a contracting business together but he needs a big job to do that —
which he hopes he has when the city they’re in decides to build a community
center and he thinks he has a good chance at landing that contract. Becca has a
friend from her college days, Mindy (Kelly Dowdle), who’s married to a
1-percenter (though we’re never told just where his money comes from or what
he’s doing career-wise now) named Max (Jason Tobias), who’s pretty much the
same physical type as Ron — only Max has frizzier hair and Ron has an elaborate
tattoo covering most of his left arm, which is the main way you can tell them
apart. The film shows us a lot of
Ron and Max in bathing suits and nothing else (way to go!) for the straight
women and Gay men in the audience, while any straight men watching this get
enough glimpses of Becca and Mindy similarly attired in swimwear to get their
sort of charge. During one evening when the two couples are having an outdoor
get-together Max and Mindy announce that they’ve “opened” their marriage to
sexual experiences with other couples. Ron and Becca are reluctant at first,
but the mere thought of a
four-way with their good buddies turns them on enough they get it on for the
first time in months.

Dylan (Zach Cramblit), a queeny Gay man who works as a
nurse or paramedic or something for Becca at the hospital where she’s a doctor,
tells her that he and his husband have an open relationship themselves, though
he also warns her that it’s a bit easier when they’re both men (either because
they don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or on the Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venus idea that
men are more able than women to detach sex from emotion and have it just for
the sheer physical pleasure involved). Ron, Becca, Max and Mindy have their
first “open” encounter at Max’s home and set ground rules — they won’t do
anything unless all four are involved and they’ll use “protection” against both
pregnancy and STD’s. Their second open encounter occurs at a private sex club
called Caligula (which made me wonder if they specifically catered to people
who want to have sex with their siblings, the way the real Caligula did), which
you get invitations to through text messages on your smartphone that tell you
what the password is for that night. (No, it’s not “Swordfish.”) The two
couples are greeted at the door by an apparition who’s apparently the dungeon
mistress of Caligula, Vulnavia (Debra Wilson), a woman of ambiguous ethnicity
who’s dressed in a skin-tight leather outfit and looks more at home in the
sexual underground than anyone else in the film. The couples’ second encounter
with each other’s partners at Caligula is as hot as the first, but midway
through the proceedings Max and Becca slip away from one of the dungeon’s
private rooms to another, breaking the two couples’ ground rules because they
found the furniture in the first room uncomfortable. The seeds of jealousy
start to sprout as Ron, left alone one evening when Becca works a late shift
(she covered for her Gay friend Dylan so he and his husband could go to a Lady
Gaga concert) and Ron runs out of football games to watch, instead going to
Caligula alone, where he’s accosted by a woman named Angelique (Cassi Colvin)
who comes on to him; they kiss, but nothing more. We also see a mysterious
person in a white feathered mask who’s being attended to by two men, one on
either side of — well, we assume
it’s a she, though there are hints of both Gay and Lesbian goings-on at this
mostly hetero club. Still later it’s Becca who breaks the ground rules and goes
to Caligula on her own, and had screenwriter Byers stopped there he might have
had a very interesting movie about people who think they can handle the sexual underground, find they
really can’t, and suffer picturesquely along the way before reverting to
monogamy at the end.

One particularly interesting twist is that Ron isn’t
entirely infertile but he’s told by one of the doctors at Becca’s hospital that
he has only one-one hundredth of the chance of impregnating his wife as a
normal man. That leads to the tantalizing possibility that the entire “open
marriage” business was stage-managed by Becca as a way of having a child; since
her husband couldn’t give her one, she decided to go after Max and see if he could do the job (which could have led to an
intriguing sequel 20 years later, as the kid, now grown, learns that his
biological father is fabulously wealthy and goes after his money). Instead Open
Marriage takes a turn into typical Lifetime
melodramatics that significantly weaken it; the two couples find themselves
victimized by a no-good rotter who sends texts with photos of them at Caligula.
This costs Ron the city contract he was so desperate to get and leaves both
couples floundering in a sea of mutual jealousy and recrimination, and it turns
out the culprit is … Mindy, who it seems always had the hots for Ron (and maybe
a Lesbian itch for Becca as well), and who ends up literally holding a gun on
Ron to force him into one last orgy and, when Becca is unwilling to go along,
she fires the gun and Becca reaches for an odd antique clock with its own
pedestal and clubs Mindy over the head with it, killing her. The cops accept
Becca’s self-defense claim and a tag scene indicates that the child she’s
carrying is Ron’s after all — he made it in the 1/100th window. Open
Marriage offered plenty of titillation (or
dickillation) for this Gay viewer — even though the script didn’t give them
much to work with in the way of acting, when I can watch a movie with two
people as gorgeous as Tilky Jones (despite that silly name) and Jason Tobias
and see them mostly wearing nothing but the bare legal minimum, I’m going to
enjoy it on aesthetic grounds alone — but it could have been a titillating
joyride and a moral tale instead
of writing the “villain” character (Mindy was the woman in the feathered mask
at Caligula taking the damning photos she later sexted far and wide, costing
Ron his job) in and turning the resolution flat and ordinary.